{"sf1_id":null,"sf2_id":"14D4KWd1","title":"An Act of Seidhr","author":"Rob MacWolf","words":1944,"posted_at":"2026-01-11T04:57:44.000Z","tags":["PaeonicTetrameter","Paganism","Personal","Spiritual","poetry"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/14D4KWd1-an-act-of-seidhr","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/14D4KWd1","image_url":"https://www.sofurryfiles.com/std/thumb?page=\u0026ext=.jpg","description":"","content":"I was born to those who loathed me, although they did not yet know it  \nTaught hymns unto a god who would delight in my destruction.  \nConfirmed and consecrated to religion that despised me.  \nYet I am blamed for leaving it. The fathers call me faithless  \nTo promises I never made. They remonstrate against me.  \nDecry they, as a scandal, on the fact that I, a heathen  \nAm living as a heathen would. Well then. Let’s hear the charges.  \nLet there be no past or future. Only different kinds of present.  \nLet layer pile on layer till the shape that is eternal  \nAnd built of the all the places that the years have or will see me  \nIs visible at last. If then you think you recognize me  \nSpeak then, and not before, on my apostacy. Now follow:  \nThe roads we are retracing in my history are weary.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\nThe first seed is mere fantasy. The sort that every student  \nOf Middle Earth and Narnia and Player’s Handbook conjures.  \nI thought this merely fiction, never would have thought to worship,  \nSo understand that I intended no idolatries. They happen  \nWhen I’ve not been this version of me nigh onto a decade.  \nBehold the me long-past, who by experimental mouthfeel  \nIs fitting names together. And perhaps you ought to hear them—  \nHear then, of Mistolin, who is the Wolf Behind the Sunset,  \n(May he give us Rest From Grieving and the shelter of his kinship.)  \nCruel Barrolan, of Sunrise, strong and prouder than the mountains,  \n(May He Who Howls the Morning Light appeased be, and ignore us.)  \nDark Fenruoq, the Hidden Name, who with the dead is waiting,  \n(For Death is known to everyone. His name must be familiar.)  \nOf Firiel, the Spider of the Moon and of Night’s Wisdom,  \n(Hail Mother, Full of Moonlight, from whom secrets are unhidden.)  \nAnd Setirov, her only son, of Wind, of Inspiration  \n(The Breath of All the World, tornado death could not extinguish.)  \nFair Kataranya, Laughter in the Lightning, in the Thunder,  \n(The Lightning that is Love, the archeress of Bolt and Blessing.)  \nGreat Hrakulotha, Lord of War, of power and protection,  \nThe Boots that Crush the Thin One (whose true name must not be spoken.)  \nAnd Narwahye his bride, Lady of Peace, who rules the hearthfire  \n(Hail Narwahye, in whose presence no violence can happen.)  \nOf Dahfui, her sibling, foe and student of her husband,  \n(The Many-Colored, Ever Changed and Changing Flame of Courage.)  \nOrigyen of the Forests, fearful lord of fear and harvest  \n(The Fruit Tree in the Wilds, that may be tasted but with danger.)  \nOdurum, Lord of Vengeance, seething on the holy mountain,  \n(The Lord of Endless Anger, may his Eye turn not upon us.)  \nAmruoq, lord of journeys, and the watcher of the crossroads,  \n(May our ways be swift and easy. May we find what we are seeking.)  \nHeimos and Venias, unknowable to minds or mortals,  \n(Of Time, Eternity, and What the Dead Keep from the Living.)  \nArcoreas, The Conquering Cold, of every face of Winter,  \nVirility Without Fertility, (and those who have it.)  \nAnd half-mortal Ishamantaru, of the Sun of Heaven  \n(Glory to Ishamantaru, in the highest of the heavens.)  \nRemember all these names of gods. As they are clothed with story,  \nAs all the men I used to be mythologize about them,  \nThey soon enough will grow to more than names. And we will see them  \nAchieve the transformation of my selves both past and future.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\nA few years further, in the shadow of some dread cathedral,  \nExtravagantly wondrous, of the Ba’al of the Christians,  \nThere is a version of me. He is weary of the shadow  \nOf the wondrous worldly temple to the Ba’al of the Christians.  \n(The irony is that the faith they walk by and don’t look at  \nIs perfectly designed to give salvation to the many  \nThey use it to oppress. But that is my concern no longer.)  \nHe’s hungry every minute, he is on starvation rations.  \nHe’s as cold as he is lonely. He is weary of the crossroads:  \nFor every minute of the years he’s lived here, in the shadow,  \nHe has hung upon the crossroads, but never has he seen there  \nA road that leads to any refuge one like him might shelter.  \nYet here at least he lives beyond the shadows of his parents.  \nYet here at last he’s said out loud the truth that he was born with.  \nAnd here he’s learned a lesson quite apart from that intended  \nOn Abstract Artifacts, Reference, Necessary Naming,  \nOn how a story told is Ontologic extra Layer,  \nOn how the purpose of the human mind is to make meaning  \nAnd once a meaning’s made, why, it remaineth made eternal.  \nHis time here is not lengthy. Soon will Multiple Sclerosis  \nWork hand in accidental hand with lust to break his prison  \nAnd he will learn the loneliness that all his life was used to  \nIs but one more illusion of the Ba’al of the Christians.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\nOn bench much-disregarded, in the shadow of the summer  \nIn a city dedicated to the god I had abandoned—  \nYet another variation of the Ba’al of the Christians—  \nSits a me that is deciding. Merely inches from the traffic,  \nYet years off from the meaning of the choice that he is making.  \nHe has witnessed, in his labors, tempting titles as they passed him:  \n“The Shaman’s Call” “The Hidden Paths” “The Book of Self-Becoming”  \nAnd others, cheaply printed, to disguise their grains of wisdom  \nAs self-psychology, and facile fortitude, and folly.  \nBut he remembers names, once sculpted out of idle insights.  \nAnd he remembers theses, once aborted but still potent.  \nAnd he knows how completely he cannot believe in nothing.  \nWhatever futures would have come, if but he had decided  \nTo disregard his longings and endure in sun-bleached silence  \nThe weary ostentation of the Ba’al of the Christians,  \nOf them I cannot speak. Some paths are better left abandoned.  \nIn the semi-solitude of being solely still awakened,  \nOf midnight in the bedroom, he is practicing, he’s stumbling.  \nHe has had no actual training, no techniques of meditation,  \nAnd he must by trial and error slowly grope his spirit trance-ward.  \nIt matters not how long it takes—a year, less than a minute—  \nHe finds a path eventually. He builds it out of memories.  \nThrough lion’s den and culvert, under road, across the alley,  \nBy sex and stone and symbolism through the mesocyclone,  \nThen rising from strange waters, under strange stars, to a lakeshore  \nNot as he’s seen with waking eyes. For this place is its spirit.  \nA great black wolf is waiting there, whom he is not expecting.  \nAt first he does not realize with whom he’s covenanted—  \nFor covenant they make: the one to be a god, the other  \nTo have the kind of god he needs—but soon he will remember.  \nGod takes him there, submissive, worshipful, and sacramental,  \nOr rather God takes me, for at that moment I become me.  \nAnd in my God’s new name I claim the place that I remember  \nAnd never will behold in flesh again. I have no need to.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\nIn ages past (How many? At least four, ere Common Era)  \nSome philosophic wrestling with the world that was purported  \nThe world to be as shadow-puppets, of ideas eternal.  \nIf that be so, then what would follow if one learned to master  \nThe fashioning of shadow-puppets, and of their performance?  \nIn ages past (How many? Enough that we don’t remember)  \nIt was believed by those who might as well be my ancestors  \nThat poetry and magic were the same thing: to speak verses  \nWas to speak spells as well, and that is why it’s called ‘Enchantment.’  \nIn ages past (How many? None can say. More than are counted.)  \nThere was a river. Those who lived there knew a God of Sunset,  \nA Black Wolf of the Sunset, and the God of Rest From Grieving.  \nThey argued that the soul was many-parted, like the body—  \nOr rather that the body was itself a part. Their pharaohs  \nLay mummified for just this reason, that might last forever  \nThe soul-part that was body. Now, I am no Khemetic.  \nAnd I will have no access, after death, to preservation.  \nI am a poor wayfaring stranger, and my world is woeful.  \nWhen I am free from earthly trails, this body drops, abandoned  \nWith neither funeral nor headstone to commemorate it.  \nBut on that ancient river soul had other parts, especially  \nThe name was such a part, perhaps the very most important.  \nAnd I do well remember what I learned when I was living  \nBeneath the dread cathedral of the Ba’al of the Christians  \nOn Naming and Necessity. So if my name’s remembered  \nLet it be my true name, the Son of Wolf, that lives forever.  \nLet layer pile on layer till the name that is eternal  \nAnd built of the all the deeds that I have dared to do, the stories  \nThat I have told by fireside, by the highway, under sunset  \nIs all there is of me. What else is there I’d wish to salvage?  \nAnd if it grow to more than name, why that is as intended.  \nFor this is transformation of the self both past and future.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\nBehold the real me, then. See the me that is named truly.  \nIt’s in this name he does the things that matter. He sees visions  \nOf far green country, over western sea, and he sees offered  \nA peace that is eternal, on white shores, under dark forests,  \nWhich he declines, with gratitude. There’s work that must be seen to.  \nHe dreams of godly bargaining, of recipes for cunning.  \nHe’s told that he will be a slave to secrecy and seidhr.  \nHe leads a man he loves to Winter, and a God to worship.  \nHe shows a man he loves the Moonlight, and a Gracious Goddess.  \nHe finds a man to love, though sadly only at a distance.  \nHe dedicates a pathway to the dead who seek for guidance  \n(Eternal rest grant unto them, Lord Setirov the Wind-guide.)  \nHe finds a man to love, and he becomes his slave in earnest  \nAs once had been foretold. And of that man he learns deep secrets.  \nHe reads that on the clouds is written Vengeance, next to Courage.  \nHe smites in name of Winter and of Windstorm and of Vengeance  \nThe land that has betrayed him. And he waits for it to perish.  \nHe’s given, as if by coincidence, a fireside story  \nAnd place to tell it plus a thousand more. His voice will echo  \nBeyond the world material. And there his name is written.  \nAt last he finds a place to rest, with men he’s found to love him.  \nHe makes that place his temple, and his refuge for the grieving.  \n(For the unloved and the weary, there to taste of Rest from Grieving.)  \nHe seals it as safe haven with the hearthfire of Narwahye.  \nHe’s guarded it with padlock and the ire of Hrakulotha.  \nAnd Mistolin his Father there did dwell with him, and love him  \nEven the days when he could not believe that he deserved it.\n\n\u0026nbsp;\n\n…and if that be apostacy, why, excommunicate me.  \nCondemn me to be heathen for attempting to be heathen  \nAnd succeeding. I want nothing from the Ba’al of the Christians.  \nIn these I place my soul, and everything my soul has cherished  \nWhere you, resentful entropy, will have no power to touch it,  \nWhere there is no past or future, only different kinds of present.  \nIn the Name of Mistolin. So Saith the Son of Wolf. So Be It.","series":{"name":"poetry","previous":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/k1V9BAWn-to-the-last-memory-of-john-and-syd.json","next":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/14D483Q1-redacted-ballade.json"}}